The Dayton, Ohio Air Show is going on this weekend, so I thought I would write a post on making paper airplanes. These aren’t your regular plain white paper airplanes, but colorful, sturdy, military airplanes.
I made these for my grandson, Kylan. Like all small children, he loves airplanes. At the time his mom worked at Wright Bros Aero and she was able to take Kylan to see all the planes during the Air Show and he fell in love with them.
Here’s What You’ll Need
12” X 12” heavy card stock
Color paper or vinyl for embellishments
Double stick tape
Glue stick
Scissors
Folding the airplane
You can use whatever size heavy paper you want. I wanted to make different sizes, so using 12” X 12” card stock let me do this.
- Fold paper in half horizontally, then fold each side toward the center crease (leave a little gap so it will fold easily)
- Fold each side towards the center crease again.
- Fold the sides back to form the wings
- Open, and trim away the excess paper so it looks like the right side in the picture above.
- Refold and turn up the end of each wing and trim off the excess so they look like this. If you want you can cut the top edges so they look like the blue and yellow “Navy” airplane wings.
- To keep the plane together, open the middle and apply double stick tape.
Embellishments
You can embellish your planes any way you want. For mine, I went online to see how the different military planes are decorated.
I used my Cricut machine to cut the letters and stars. I used some adhesive back yellow vinyl I had for the “Navy” plane and white Avery label paper for the other planes. If you don’t have a Cricut or another cutting machine, you can create the letters and stars on your computer or trace them using templates, and then cut them out and then glue them on with a glue stick.
You can make a mobile by poking holes through the planes and tying on fish line.
This is a great project for kids and a way to celebrate our Armed Forces.
God Bless America and the men and women who fight to protect us all!
pegsgottado 
Thank you so much, the airplanes are beautiful! My son and fiancée graduated at the Air Force Academy and are getting married in October. I was looking for something different , so I searched on google for a paper airplane and saw your site. I am going to make them and instead place cards on the table, I am going to have an airplane for each guest and on the wing I will write their name. You make beautiful things.
Thank you so much. That’s a clever idea.